The County of Birches Read online

  “Yes!” Cimi chirped, quick to capitalize on the good mood, “I even have a laurel wreath like Caesar!”

  Sári froze. Now Cimi evidently was showing off something the others greeted with delight. Sári hated what Cimi had made, even before she laid eyes on it. With just some trinket, Cimi had dispelled the afternoon’s solemnity in a second. Was that how cheaply justice could be bought? Sári felt violated. Cimi had hurt her again, but everyone ignored it. Outrage staunched her tears and withered her self-pity. She felt walled off from her family by her sense of injury. Sári was the good child. That should count for something!

  She remembered the bible story she had puzzled over more than once since the first time she heard it, the story about Noah and the flood. Sári sympathized with the Lord’s desire to wash away evil. She readily accepted the premise that the world had gone bad and just one man alone remained true to the laws of the Lord. One good man and his family remained among a world of God-deniers and sinners, and they deserved to be rewarded. She even accepted that the Lord would spare only two of each kind; after all, the other species were just animals. She imagined the ark rocking forty days and forty nights under a black sky—the lightless, endless days. They must have become very attached to each other, man and beast alike. The last ones left on the face of the earth.

  What Sári couldn’t understand was why Noah twice released birds to see if the waters had receded. The second bird was a dove. What about the first? A nameless bird released too soon, it flew high and wide but didn’t return. That didn’t seem fair. The bird was just doing what it was told. A premature courier, it was defeated by the flood and dark clouds and not a dry twig in sight. Of all the Lord’s punishments, this one seemed to Sári altogether heartless and wasteful. A blameless bird sent out at the Lord’s command, and what for? Was He not all-knowing? He was fully aware that the floods had not subsided.

  The nursery door opened quietly, light flooding the doorway. Cimi’s slight figure swam in it. Some hero, Sári scoffed—skinny, small-boned, and wearing on her head an ugly, twiggy thing, no doubt the work of “art” Cimi had used to charm their family. Sári was disgusted with them for being so easily duped.

  “What do you want?” Sári demanded. Cimi didn’t approach right away, but floated in the portal. When she stepped into the room’s darkness, it looked from Sári’s position in bed that Cimi’s feet sank through the light. It was nauseating. Cimi was rewarded for misbehaving while Sári had been made to suffer. She was sick from the injustice of it. And now Cimi had the nerve to look pathetic. Twigs and bark and spiky leaves stuck out from her hair. Did she expect Sári to feel sorry for her?

  “Get lost,” Sári threatened. “Leave me alone.”

  “Sári,” Cimi said so meekly it made her sister uncomfortable, “don’t hold it against me that I ran away. What would be the sense of both of us getting thrashed?”

  She took off her crown and held it out as a peace offering. “Here. You can have it. I worked on it all afternoon.”

  Sári felt hard. She didn’t know why she couldn’t accept Cimi’s apology. But her heart was hard and set. She felt unyielding and sure. She would never accept cheap reparation. She would have nothing to do with that wreath her sister had made. Her skin crawled to think of it prickly and poking on her head. She had been beaten and wronged, but not for her the crown of a martyr.

  “Keep the stupid thing,” Sári said, pushing it away, but Cimi looked crestfallen, so Sári relented grudgingly and made room for her sister in their bed.

  “Listen,” Cimi whispered after a bit. Sári heard nothing at first but the usual sounds of the household restored to its evening liveliness.

  “Ssh,” Cimi whispered again, “listen outside.”

  Sári tried to block out the black whistle by concentrating on nearer sounds. There was her father’s gruff voice, followed by peals of girlish laughter. Apparently nobody in the main room heard anything out of the norm. Why, Sári pondered bitterly, must she?

  * * *

  Years later, Sári concluded that there was something wrong with the bible story because it offered no explanation for the punishment of the blameless. She would not go so far as to say that she found the Lord wanting, but His scribe had failed to adequately justify His actions.

  In Auschwitz Cimi disappeared into herself, leaving behind her body. For a while, four of them were left: Sári and Cimi, Toni, and a cousin called Margit. The others had vanished. Apuka and his sons-in-law were dragged off with the men. Against Apuka’s voluble insistence, Laci and their older brother Izi had refused to have anything to do with the vineyard and the shop. They had gone abroad to universities before the worst was upon them. But Mamuka and the sisters with the babies were taken from the main block and never seen again. In a last moment’s inspiration, Mamuka had snatched the baby from the daughter standing nearest her, shouting, “Give me back my child.” Fiercely hugging the screaming infant, Mamuka had pushed a stunned Toni towards Sárika. “Get away from my baby!”

  Sári had pulled Toni in beside her and held on to her wrist. “Shut up,” she hissed at her older sister, tugging her off before she snapped to. Sári didn’t look back at Mamuka, or Netti, or Erzsike, or the babies she had helped to raise. She pulled Toni away in a vicelike grip.

  You can’t make someone live, though, Sári thought. You can give birth and feed and nurture, but you can’t give life. Both Sári and Cimi had seen the same thing. All of them in the camp, running like ants under the hail of bullets pouring from a warplane. Sári ran, not knowing how she dodged, tripping over the fallen, or where she’d find cover. Stumbling over someone who moved, miraculously still stirred, although a hole, wide and open, gaped in the small of her back. Her cousin Margit. Sári caught the profile of the face already half ground into dirt. And as she blundered beneath the hail, she saw others too with holes riddled through them. Cimi flashed across the yard, then both of them were riveted by a figure upright and gently swaying, the only ant not scurrying but inclined towards the hail. When it shattered over them again, Sári and Cimi were sent flying. But Toni accepted the bullets like an ascent. She didn’t fall, but rose to meet them.

  Since then, it was harder to keep Cimi going. Ordered to file in, Sári would pull Cimi along. In the queue for food, she poked Cimi to remind her to hold out her tin plate. It occurred to Sári that, squatting over the shitpile, Cimi might actually let her muscles give way and sink into the filth. They would be ordered to bury her in it were such an accident to occur. But Sári knew it would be no mistake. Cimi’s withdrawal was as steady as the shuffling advance of the queue that snaked towards the showers. Eventually Sári found herself thinking more about Cimi than herself. She was almost grateful to her for it.

  Leaning against the wooden shell of the barracks, Cimi’s jaw slackened. She could sit immobile and in such complete absence from her body, the spit would collect at the corner of her mouth. When no one was looking, Sári stroked Cimi’s cheek to make its reflex tighten up. But she couldn’t work Cimi’s muscles forever.

  “Idiot!” the kapo shouted, belting Cimi’s loose mouth. “Do you know what happens to idiots in this place?”

  The hatred of the Jewish overseer assigned to their block wasn’t specific. He satisfied himself with kicking any of them in the ribs to make them get up. But the weakest among them especially enflamed his fury; a bruise was an invitation for him to beat it again.

  Cimi didn’t flinch. Perhaps she had already abandoned her nerves. Infuriated, the kapo pawed her eyelid, prying it up. “Do you think you can make me believe you’re sick?”

  He shoved his thumb into her eyeball and pressed, grinding his thumb into the socket until Sári feared the eye might ooze out like the white of an egg. Not a muscle twitched in Cimi’s face. But her arm rose like a crank. It came up effortlessly, trained in a trajectory that hit the kapo in the face. She had been absent ever since they lost Toni, but she returned to hit the kapo. Hit him with the hard back of her hand. A reflex? The kind o
f reflex that made you kick a mad dog that was foaming at the mouth. A reflex that made you climb to the treetop where its branches had thinned to matchsticks. A reflex of defiance, or a penchant for death?

  A picture of Rózsa the cook appeared to Sári, Rózsa as she had been when Sári and Cimi were little girls, not wasted like the last time Sári had seen her, before Rózsa and all the others were taken to be gassed. Rózsa as she had stood under the elm like a tree herself, an extension of the earth that fed and formed them, Rózsa ordering Sári down from where she had drifted high above the elm: “You’ll be sorry, Miss, if I have to come up there to get you!” Sári had chosen terra firma, but Cimi had continued climbing, higher and higher.

  The kapo’s blows broke the thin skin on Cimi’s skull. Blood poured from her split head and smashed nose and raw cheek. Paralyzed with horror, Sári felt captive to the love that forced her to witness. Helpless, mute, numbness instantly filling the cavity as it was torn open inside her, she watched. Inured against the onset of anguish, Sári drifted to a plane where she was totally alone.

  A rifle butt cracked on concrete, so close Sári’s heart might have stopped if it weren’t already suspended. “Enough!” a voice commanded in a German supercilious with disgust. Sári slid to the ground, joining her sister who had started to scream.

  She stuffed her rag of a skirt into Cimi’s mouth to stifle the cries that welled from the place where she’d been hiding. For evidently Cimi had been in hiding. Hiding somewhere in a secret place. Not that far away, but very carefully hidden. Sári resented her for it, even as she held down her raving sister. Somehow Cimi had managed, for a time, to escape. Sári stopped Cimi’s mouth with her filthy skirt. She held her sister down as Cimi writhed and bucked in her blood. The bird who couldn’t bring herself to return with the terrible news of what she had seen. Sári rejected the vision as she sensed she had before in that other life she mustn’t remember so clearly. Despite the evidence of Sári’s eyes and ears and heart’s blind crashing, they were not dumb animals, blameless and expendable. Sári still believed that she counted.

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  My father Gábor’s life was split down the middle. Before the Fall was Life; then came the Word. Gábor’s mouth filled with verbs parsed in past tense, and Life was rendered in telling.

  The story began every November. “The surrounding countryside was poor and sandy,” said Gábor, “but the Rákóczi Tanya bloomed like an oasis in the desert. In a manner of speaking, we came to life between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. We lived on the Lord’s riches and with His blessing like the first man and woman in their Garden of Joy. And for a time we multiplied.”

  “We,” I didn’t have to be reminded, was Gábor’s sweeping reference to the Grószmann család, some of whom had given up the name Grószmann, following the lead of Gábor’s Uncle Szedrás and opting to Magyarize their name during the Great War. The more tradition-loving, pious members of the family persisted by way of Grószmann, but their kin, beloved notwithstanding because this family—család—solved their differences by inclusion, changed their name to Szemes, meaning clearsighted and clever—or corn fodder—depending on its usage. Gábor used it both ways, the former as it represented the family’s progressive, worldly character before the Fall, and the latter referring to their outcome, especially during his seasonal bout of melancholy.

  This name-playing, Gábor noted with more pride than irony, went on in a family that before it became a család was without a name altogether, descended from one Itzig the Jew who had surfaced on the sandy plain of northeastern Hungary not much more than a century earlier. Itzig the Jew, a wanderer (it would not have occurred to Gábor to contemplate an ancestor as a wastrel), too spent to drift any further, settled for and on the sand-blown turf of an obscure nation steeped in feudal tradition. In Itzig’s time, as for centuries, Hungarian society was divided between the rich and the wretchedly poor. This orphaned or wander-lusting Jew, blown here like an errant seed from another barren dirt-poor corner of central Europe, became the progenitor of what Gábor described as an anomalous bourgeois, name-shuffling, gold-disbursing család-clan.

  Here Gábor might interject that he had tried name-playing too, after the Fall, but had lacked the flair for it. His father, “your dearly beloved grandfather Wilmos Weisz,” he would instruct as though I might forget my grandfather’s name one year to the next, had made his home among his in-laws the Grószmanns, as a partner to Gábor’s Grandfather Aron. After the Second World War when the great estates were dismantled and the land owners disenfranchised, Gábor wasn’t deeply affronted. It was, by then, a redundant expropriation. But his father’s name was precious and he was loathe to give it up. Weisz was both Germanic and Jewish, and the Soviets bore no love for either. Dogged, true, lacking imagination for anything but what he remembered, Gábor substituted, for the necessary interval, his father’s given name for his surname.

  This abysmal lack of vision for the possibilities of makeover I imagine would have caused Uncle Szedrás Szemes to baptize Gábor in spittle for the second time in Gábor’s life. “I came into this world blue and disfigured with the umbilicus strangling my breath,” Gábor intoned, “so ugly that my Uncle Szedrás spontaneously baptized me. Presented with his sister’s first-born, the first of his beloved father’s grandchildren, Uncle Szedrás reared in disgust. ‘You call this a baby! I call it—phph!’ And he christened me with saliva.”

  Swaggering, military-blue-breasted Uncle Szedrás was the one who had coined the Magyar name Szemes before joining the select Kaiser Wilhelm Hussars. Ostensibly it was to deflect military attention from his Jewishness, but some family members argued that perhaps Szedrás had wished to overlook his Jewishness himself. He, a descendent of Itzig the Nothing, had joined company with the mediaeval Counts Zichy and Esterház to pledge life and honour for Franz Josef. And his dull nephew, Gábor remarked with self-deprecating humour, grew up to lack the ingenuity to leave the past behind. I assumed my great-uncle Szedrás would have drawn a mouthful of contempt and aimed it again, with precision, between Gábor’s eyes.

  * * *

  Szedrás rocked impatiently on the heels of his knee-high field boots, glancing every few moments out the front room window to see if the children had mounted.

  “Patience, édes ocsém,” the children’s mother counselled, calming her voice to the register she used with this brother. She was older than Szedrás and entitled to call him “darling little brother,” but he was the first son, heady with self-importance. He tolerated the diminutive because she was regarded by everyone for her exalted faith. In their often intemperate and populous household, Liliana was the soft-spoken but ruling chatelaine.

  “Three pischers, what do they have so much to talk about? This isn’t the Congress of Berlin,” Szedrás fretted.

  If Liliana showed any distress, it was through silence. Szedrás’s present to her sons pained her. It was ostentatious, and excessive, reminding her of the Magyar gentry. She recoiled at the thought of her sons fawning over the goyishe plaything. Typical of Szedrás, dearly as she loved him, he had not asked her leave first, nor her husband’s. At least he should have warned his father what manner of rig he was introducing to Aron’s grandsons. But Liliana knew that her father would no more have forbidden Szedrás this gesture than she herself could deprive her boys of their delight in the toy.

  The two older boys were engaged in negotiations over who would drive the ponies. Little Miki, knowing that as youngest his turn would come last, had mounted into the carriage and was admiring its beautiful red leather seat. It was the colour of the boots of the little peasant girls who danced in national dress on the Feast of St. Stephen. He snuffled the warm new leather smell.

  “Hey,” interrupted Bandi, “don’t go rubbing your snot on it. If you’re going to act like a baby, we’re not taking you.”

  Miki bit his lip indignantly.

  Gábor interceded, tightening his hold on the reins. “The gift is for us all,” he remi
nded Bandi. Gabi was tiring, and he listed more obviously when he tired. He could feel his military uncle’s eyes boring through the window’s glass. It was humiliating enough to have to wear a corset like a woman, but he didn’t want to shame himself in front of Szedrás-bácsi by relinquishing the reins to his younger brother.

  “Look, I’ll show you how to get up to the box without letting go,” Bandi said, reaching for the lead.

  Gabi would have to settle the matter so he could sit down and take the weight off his back.

  “I’m quite capable, thank you. I know very well how the coachman mounts his box.” Before his illness Gabi had been as lavishly praised as the other children among their kin. His sense of worthiness hadn’t much corroded. After all, Anyuka assured him that he would recover and be well enough to ride as gallantly as Uncle Szedrás; it didn’t so much matter that his aunts and uncles held their tongues.

  “Let’s go,” Miki needled, bored with waiting.

  Ignoring him, Bandi pressed his claim. “Gabi, you’re holding the reins much too tight. You’ll choke them if you try climbing up like that,” he said, exasperated.

  In the house Szedrás pawed the floor, more impatient than the ponies who decorously stood their ground.

  “That’s your boys for you, darling sister,” he fumed, as close as he would get to criticizing her. There was nothing sarcastic in his address; in his estimation she was édes. But less so her sons, all jawing and no action. What should boys do with a coach and pair, but jump in and drive off? What was there to discuss about it?

  * * *

  According to Gábor, “On that day at the beginning of the First World War, Szedrás-bácsi had breakfasted in agitation. Every few moments he stood up to look out the window as though he were expecting someone. ‘Surely, öcsém,’ Anyuka questioned, ‘you cannot be awaiting more special news?’ For just recently Szedrás-bácsi had learned of his induction as föhadnagy in the Kaiser Wilhelm Hussars. This was an unprecedented honour. To serve as an officer with the elite of the Magyar nobility in the country’s most prestigious military regiment was a distinction for anyone, but for a Jew unheard of.